I-D Action:draft-ietf-idnabis-mappings-00.txt
Pete Resnick
presnick at qualcomm.com
Thu May 28 04:13:32 CEST 2009
On 5/27/09 at 7:20 PM +0900, Martin J. Dürst wrote:
>Section 2 is called "Architectural Principles", which sounds good.
>But I have mostly found some general explanations of how user input
>works these days, some explanations about the history of IDNA and
>the differences between IDNA versions, and so on, nothing getting
>close to anything Architecturally.
So, obviously my attempt at architectural explanation failed (at
least for you), but let me see if I can clear up the mystery.
>One reading of the document suggests that the "mapping" happens when
>characters are input, e.g. from the keyboard.
Sure. Part of the mapping definitely happens when characters are
input: I have yet to meet a keyboard driver that outputs scan codes
that look like any character set (let alone Unicode) that I know. And
it certainly all happens before a string of characters is handed off
to the wire.
>I think it would be a great contribution to text processing and
>internationalization on the planet if all data input happened to
>produce data in NFC. However, I unfortunately have serious doubts
>that this will happen, even if IDNA suggests it stronly (and even if
>we require it).
I think we agree on that. (Currently, IDNA2003 requires NFKC mapping.
IDNA2008 will require NFC as far as I can tell.)
>For other kinds of mappings (e.g. mapping to lower-case), it would
>be complete havoc if it happened at user input. It would be
>impossible to type UPPER-case characters.
Well, it would not be complete havoc for an application that was
implementing IDNA to put that lower-case mapping at some point after
the keyboard and before punycode. In fact, we require it. I
personally think there's no need in IDNA to do it before displaying
it on the screen, but that's a decision about the user community. It
would certainly be a terrible idea for a word processing application
to put such a mapping after the keyboard but before insertion into a
storage file for a document.
>Except for a lot of talk about keybords and the like, there is no
>discussion about where between the keyboard and the punycode
>conversion the mapping might happen. If some thought has been given
>to this, it should be included in the document. If not, somebody
>better start thinking.
Point taken. I'll add some text. (That is, before I start taking away
some text, re: Debbie and Paul.)
pr
--
Pete Resnick <http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
Qualcomm Incorporated - Direct phone: (858)651-4478, Fax: (858)651-1102
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